Trans women are not women (Part 8)

[Rolfe]

Frankly, this imposition to do a forum search to see if a topic has come up before is a new one on me. Most people just point out the other thread without the passive-aggressive hostility.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

I think it can be safely said that anything that primarily gets discussed on this forum has effectively escaped scrutiny. Society in general seems to be overlooking the points that stand out to Rolfe.

The case was covered in the LATimes, with a specific angle on how it's being discussed in a political context regarding as a barb against the controversial "progressive prosecutor" in the area. I'm sure there's been more than a few derivative commentaries in other, lesser publications.

I suppose it could be getting more scrutiny. It could be blasting nonstop on every front page and cable news shows for weeks on end. White House reporters could be peppering Biden to weigh in on it at every press brief. The people could be howling about the issue from the rooftops day and night. It could be all the buzz around every break room watercooler in the nation. But I wouldn't call the current coverage as escaping scrutiny.

If anything I ever do is covered in the LATimes (or my local equivalent the Boston Globe), I would not characterize that as a scrutiny-free affair.

 

[Emily's Cat]

After all, it's only jokes, isn't it?

Well, in the case of Gervais, it isn't jokes at all - it's exactly what trans activists actually for realsies actually say. Gervais did nothing at all except repeat their own words.

So... is it offensive because what TRAs say is offensive in and of itself? Or is it offensive because it shows how incredibly bereft of sense TRA arguments and behavior is?

 

[Emily's Cat]

No, it's the ring-fencing of definitions that's the problem.

Take the core topic of this thread: the growth in the proportion of young people who do not consider themselves classically heterosexual. In "westernised" societies, from at least the middle ages up until astonishingly recently, it was near-axiomatic that "normal" males were exclusively sexually attracted to females, and vice-versa. Those were the rules and the definitions. Anyone who declared themselves to exist outside those rules and definitions was, in a very real sense, a sick deviant - not just against society but against the very God who held such a dominant position in society (again, until only very recently).

Fortunately, in 2022, there are only small pockets of bigots, denialists and religious fundamentalists who continue to reject the normalcy of sexual identities which differ from classical heterosexuality. This, in itself, is extremely likely to be a significant driver of the growth in reported non-heterosexuality: many such people repressed their true sexuality a few generations ago, because it was such a societal and religious taboo (an evil, in fact); whereas in general, people feel much more confident about publicly declaring their true sexual identity in the current climate.

Transgender is not a sexual orientation, and it has nothing at all to do with heterosexuality or homosexuality.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Does anyone define manhood and womanhood as purely physical properties? I've seen biological sex defined so, but not social constructs like manhood and womanhood. How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? Is your answer "zero, because a man is a man at the moment of conception"? When someone says "how many men are in this room" does your answer include fetuses, babies, toddlers, and boys?

I realize you're an active part of the holy crusade upon That Topic, but not everything relating to sex and gender is an outgrowth of That Topic. I don't know of any culture that has ever existed that didn't have a separate concept of manhood and womanhood from biological sex.

What makes a man a man? Anatomy arranged around the production of sperm and having attained puberty.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I agree...but there's already fuzziness introduced. What is adulthood? It's defined differently in different cultures. Some just have to pass a certain age (and there's another issue there--not every culture reckons ages the same way), others have to perform a specific action, others have a ritual, and others judge the passage into adulthood by a collection of responsibilities one acquires. I don't think there's a "scientific", laws-of-physical-universe definition for adulthood any more than there is for manhood or womanhood. Male, female, and physically mature are not the same as man, woman, and adult.

Now you're conflating legal definitions of adulthood under the law with the attainment of sexual fertility. When we're talking about sex, "adult" means "has reached a point in sexual development where the critter is capable of reproduction".

 

[Emily's Cat]

What is your point? You wish to establish a scientific, physical definition for manhood and womanhood and compel the rest of us to agree to abide by it? Good luck with that. I'm sure each of humanity's several hundred cultures will be falling over themselves to buy into your ideas.

Silly TragicMonkey. Every culture on the planet ALREADY abides by the scientific definition of manhood and womanhood. That's how babies happen, and it's how we keep managing to continue as a species.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Your inability to (react to) change is your problem, not ours.

How do you think babies get made?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Well now that's pretty stupid. It's a lockdown drill. It's not like these kids were going to be taking off their clothes.


They aren't going to comment on the case, but why the heck would the question ever come up. The answer to which locker room to use in a lockdown drill is "Whichever one is closest." That's the answer for every student, not just the transgender kids.

Dumb. Just plain dumb. I would love to hear someone try and justify this.


It's so dumb, in fact, that I'm wondering if it's true. So often the stories that are so incredibly stupid that you can't believe they actually happened, didn't. However, I can't come up with any scenario that would create the issue unless it was true.

Agreed on all points. This is some profound stupidity from someone somewhere, as "the closest one" should be the right one.

 

[Emily's Cat]

So you think material along the lines of "Not those old-fashioned women with wombs.... those new women with beards and cocks".... *cue ribald audience laughter, having been given permission by the performer to laugh*....

..... comes from a position of genuine care about the rights of transwomen, and/or a genuine care about the way in which the general public perception of transwomen might be affected by what he said?

I see. You don't see.

I would suggest that it captures the general human perception that people with beards and cocks aren't actually "women". They can be transwomen, sure. But they aren't actually women. Because they are male. As evidenced by their beards and cocks.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Thanks for "leaving this here".

Your point is....?

I think the point is pretty clear. We ALL know who are the men and who are the women, no matter how hard we try to dress up our language.

(FWIW, the world's sporting administration bodies are - quite correctly - seeking to make evidence-based decisions in this whole area*, so as to make a proportionate and properly-balanced decision. My own view is that within a few years, there will be sufficient evidential data in almost all sports to show that transwomen do indeed, in general, hold an unfair advantage over ciswomen in all power, strength or endurance sports. As such, I expect - and will welcome - a ban on transwomen competing in most sports at elite- and sub-elite-level. Outside of that, however, I expect progressive societies to accept that transmen are men and vice-versa, and for that acceptance to be protected in law.)


* Just as, for example, they sought to do in cases such as that of Caster Semanya

I appreciate your reasonableness on the topic of sport.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm not convinced it's reasonable to allow males into junior and school athletics girls' events. That's where the élite athletes begin, and if girls are discouraged because boys can identify into the events they've been training hard for and blow them off the track, they're going to lose interest pretty quickly.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Shall I explain what a rhetorical question is?

How about you just tell us what your favorite part of Gervais' special was? That would be nice. Because right now, I'm not particularly convinced that you even bothered to watch it.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Your bald and sweeping assertion about an innate nature of modesty (and sloppily applied with any nuance here) is not simply borne out by cultural observation.

I disagree, but I welcome your explanation and support for your assertion so we can discuss the matter in more detail.

 

[xjx388]

All of which is fine as far as it goes. My issue is that it goes very far into territory that is essentially meaningless, and not near far enough into territory where it really matters.

For example, "non-binary gender self ID" is completely irrelevant to the question of whether you should be competing in men's sports or women's sports.

This is exactly it. My daughter, on National Coming Out Day, came out as non-binary. She even said it herself, "this changes nothing you know about me." Ok, then, why did you have to say it? The only answer that makes sense is that she wants attention.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Although, at that point, it might be difficult to convince me that any segregation at all makes sense. It's hard to imagine a scenario in my head where self-identified gender created a reason for segregation. What would be the purpose? Why bother?

That is a conclusion that some institutions have come to, instead prioritizing individual modesty.

I don't know if modesty is innate or culturally imparted, but I don't really see how that matters and I think the impulse should be respected either way. That doesn't require sex segregation to achieve, and indeed sex segregated, communal spaces are transparently inferior in achieving this goal.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Can a person be mistaken about feeling they like apples?

Yes.

Brains are consummate liars. My brain is quite convinced that lemon is a disgusting flavor. Every time someone offers me lemon cake or lemon cookies or other lemony desert foods, my instinctual and immediate response is "eew, gross, no". But in reality, my tongue very much likes lemony deserts. Every time I actually take a bite of one my tongue goes "ooh this is fantastic give me more".

Similarly, my brain is pretty sure I like broccoli. Somewhere along my development road, it decided that broccoli is good. So I keep ordering the damnable stuff, and without fail I take a bite and think it is very unpleasant and wish I'd had the spinach or the green beans instead.

People can absolutely be mistaken about their own preferences.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I think generally liberal girls and women do in fact have an issue with being seen nude by the opposite sex. Even briefly. They also have an issue with being seen in their underwear by the opposite sex.

Let's be explicit here: Even very liberal females have an issue with being seen nude by the opposite sex WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.

That's the issue. It's the issue of consent. Most females have granted tacit consent to be seen by (and to see) other females in specific contexts. But those contexts are well understood and we all know going in that there are likely to be nude females there.

But we did NOT give tacit consent to be seen by (or to see) males in those contexts.

They are trying to change the rules and pretend that those rules have always been in place. And in doing so they are overstepping the boundaries of females and are violating our right to consent.

 

[xjx388]

No, it's the ring-fencing of definitions that's the problem.

Take the core topic of this thread: the growth in the proportion of young people who do not consider themselves classically heterosexual. In "westernised" societies, from at least the middle ages up until astonishingly recently, it was near-axiomatic that "normal" males were exclusively sexually attracted to females, and vice-versa. Those were the rules and the definitions. Anyone who declared themselves to exist outside those rules and definitions was, in a very real sense, a sick deviant - not just against society but against the very God who held such a dominant position in society (again, until only very recently).

Fortunately, in 2022, there are only small pockets of bigots, denialists and religious fundamentalists who continue to reject the normalcy of sexual identities which differ from classical heterosexuality. This, in itself, is extremely likely to be a significant driver of the growth in reported non-heterosexuality: many such people repressed their true sexuality a few generations ago, because it was such a societal and religious taboo (an evil, in fact); whereas in general, people feel much more confident about publicly declaring their true sexual identity in the current climate.

You are conflating sexual orientation with gender identity. Sexual orientation is not "the core topic of this thread;" gender identity (and whether or not it is real, etc) is.

Transgenderism has nothing to do with sexual orientation. In 2022 there are indeed pockets of bigotry against people who are not heterosexual, but for the vast majority of people these days, nobody cares who you take to bed anymore.

I think it's fair to say that there is a lot more bigotry against people who are transgender. But don't conflate that kind of "against God's will, you are an abomination, that just ain't right" bigotry with genuine intellectual curiosity and skepticism about the subject.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I think AGP and HSTS are hard-wired and can't be removed either.

I recall a paper somewhat recently that was doing some imaging on the part of the brain responsible for self-perception, with respect to HSTS males. This is self-perception, not identity. The research indicated that for HSTS males there was evidence of a disruption in that part of the brain, that there really was a "disconnect" between the reality of their body and what their brain perceived of their body.

The tricky bit is that this is the same part of the brain that has a disconnect with other types of body dysmorphias, including anorexia.

That lends support to the idea of a "hardwired" problem. And it aligns with how dysphoria has been described to me by some old-school transsexuals - the shock and disorientation of looking down and seeing a penis that never goes away, because their brain is absolutely convinced that it doesn't belong there.

But, and I can't stress this enough, the study I recall ONLY included people who were HSTS and had been persistently dysphoric for a long period of time, and had formal clinical diagnoses of dysphoria. It did not include any "self-id" transgender people, and it explicitly excluded AGP diagnoses.

At the end of the day, though, all that tells us is "that person is having a real experience"... which is not at all the same as "that person's experience is reality".

I think people with sexual fetishes are very concerned indeed to give the impression that what is motivating them is not a sexual fetish. (I think ROGD is a social contagion and very definitely not hard-wired. If it exists in the male which I'm not certain about.)

There does seem to be some ROGD among males, especially among males with ASD. There was a good multi-part piece about it a while back: When Sons Become Daughters

It's not as prevalent in males, but that's generally the case for pubertal social contagion. For whatever reason, it's something that young females are more susceptible to.

I'm not disagreeing with your main premise and I see the point you are making, I just want to flag up that the concessions you make in order to highlight your point are highly disputable.

I don't know what isn't a valid lived condition. AGP and HSTS are both valid lived conditions, without any doubt. I agree with your position that irrespective of the underlying causes of the trans-identification, none of that is an argument for giving male-bodied people the legal right to enter (and indeed get naked in) the intimate spaces set aside for female-bodied people.

Being a trans-identifying male is another way of being male.

Yep, yep, yep!